20 Random Facts About Derek C Adams
by Thanfiction
Summary: It's not the size that counts, it's what you do with it. Part of the Daydverse 20 random facts series.


**1. His Mum's nickname was Glinda**  
At 6'3" and hardly dainty built, his Mum had never had a boyfriend who made her feel like a lady until Rory Adams, and she blurted out her secret to the Muggle lad on their first date, terrified to get her hopes up. He hadn't believed her until she levitated him an easy ten feet in the air with a flick of his wand, but to her amazement, he'd not been at all afraid when his feet were on solid ground again. Instead, he'd kissed her and said damned if you let a maid can do that have away. From there on, he called her Glinda, his good witch, to the point where Derek was stunned to learn - at age 12 - that her name was Eleanor.

**2. He was a semi-professional anti-bully**  
It happened the first time when he was only six, pummeling a ten year old at the playground who had been picking on the little ones. He had been afraid of hurting smaller kids with his size as long as he could remember, but after that, it was like he'd received a divine calling. If the only thing bullies respected was brute force, it stood to reason there had to be someone put on this earth to intercede between them and their intended victims by their own rules. When he got to Hogwarts, Crabbe and Goyle didn't so much as look sideways at a Hufflepuff from his second week on...not after, according to what they told Madam Pomfrey, they fell down the stairs. Together. Face first.

**3. He was pulled from primary school at ten**  
That's as long as his Da had gone, and it was figured enough for Derek, especially since Mum had explained that with him being magic, there wasn't any choice on wizard school. Rory didn't like it, but at ten, Derek could pass well enough for fourteen if he kept quiet, and that was good enough to unload bales of newspapers in the morning and deliver for the grocer in the afternoon. He needed to be used to working hard if he was going to take the docks, and there was no question of that. It's what his Da did, and his Da, and his, back to when the lading had come off things with sails and maybe before.

**4. He discovered he was gay because he called another boy a fucking faggot**  
He'd thought it just meant weak and whiny, sure that was how his Da and the other men used it, and that's what he confidently told Sprout when she hauled him by the ear to her office and asked him if he understood what he said. When she explained it was a horrid term for boys who liked other boys instead of girls, he'd been stunned speechless, then burst into tears. He'd never even thought enough of the girls business before that to mention - no more than that he didn't like mustard on his sandwiches. The brief scolding turned into three hours, four soggy handkerchiefs, and not even caring that his professor took him to the kitchen and they had pudding for supper because they'd missed the proper meal.

**5. He was a vegetarian**  
The summer between third and fourth year, he worked the abattoir at Roscrow along with his Da. They'd had a bit of trouble with the Polacks, he was told, left them up it, so they were offering better wages than usual, plenty of hours. He made it to the end of the workday before vomiting in the carpark, and his Da helped him clean up and, for the first time Derek could remember, apologized. Not what he thought it'd be, he admitted, and no place for a boy, but he'd passed Derek for 18 on a handshake and a twenty quid note to a foreman who knew better, so they had to see it out. He understood, and he did the work, but he could never touch meat after, and Rory never said a cross word about it.

**6. His greatest fear was heights**  
He'd laugh that it was to be expected when you were already that far up just standing straight, but even just looking over the railing from the second floor was enough to put his heart in his throat. It was why he'd gone out for the quidditch team...to conquer it by force. Well, that and the fact Those Two were on the Slytherin team and he was damned if he'd let them at his friends with bloody BATS unopposed. It still took him up to three hours to properly stop shaking after a game or practice, though Steve could get that down to twenty minutes once they figured out certain kinds of distraction.

**7. He was taken to a prostitute at fourteen**  
When his Da said they "needed to talk about you and women," Derek thought his heart had stopped. But it wasn't what he'd feared. Instead, he'd confessed in a moment of surprising vulnerability that he "understood what's worrying thee" and that he himself had been afraid of hurting a girl accidentally at Derek's age. So to thank him for the summer's work that had been as good as any grown man, he'd hired him a night with a whore who specialized in virgins. Derek had felt like it was his turn at the abattoir as he was taken to the brothel, but she recognized within minutes what the problem was and promised to keep his secret. She used a toy to give him a quick lesson in female anatomy and a few tips "If they wed ye off," but they spent the rest of their appointment playing cards.

**8. He practiced for almost three months to ask Stephen out and still botched it**  
Derek had only meant to make Crabbe give the Ravenclaw's notes back, but there was something in those molten black eyes and that dazzling smile that had been more potent than any batch of Amortentia. Despite rumors, he hadn't dared believe that Stephen could share his proclivities, and when he finally got up the courage (helped by a healthy tot of he didn't ask he just told them what he needed it to do from the Weasley twins) to say something, it was a disaster. A babbling, tumbling, incoherent SOMETHING and how Stephen ever made out enough of it ranked among the greatest miracles of the modern age. That he had said yes...no matter his reputation as savior rather than bully, there was still no one stupid enough to point out to a 6'1" thirteen year old that he'd squealed and swooned like a girl.

**9. He wanted more than anything to be an Auror**  
It was the ultimate protector's role. But they were the elite, and everyone knew it. Derek was brawn, not brains, and certainly the kind of marks you needed and the sheer number of NEWTS was as good as a ban for a boy who was always losing points because 18 hour workdays on holidays left no time for homework. He never knew why he confessed the ridiculous dream to Steve, especially when they'd barely begun dating, but he hadn't laughed. Instead, he'd put together a schedule and a plan and said "of course you can" like it was the easiest thing. It wasn't easy. It was bloody brutal. But when he nailed E or O on nine OWLS, he believed for the first time that it was possible, and anyone who knew him knew that was all it took to make him a near unstoppable force.

**10. He loved classic cars**  
His Da and his mates could fix anything with moving parts, and a group of them had been slowly but surely restoring a '62 Jaguar E-Type they'd gotten near-totaled from the salvage. He could name all the parts of a transmission before he had adult teeth, and he'd won more than a few bets naming make, model, even year on the sound of an engine alone. The walls of his bedroom were covered in posters of gleaming sleek-lined Caddys and Aston-Martins, Corvettes and Firebirds, and if the scantily clad women draped across hoods and fenders deflected other potential suspicions, so much the better.

**11. He could sort of play guitar**  
His Granfer had taught him the graceless cords and salt-throated simple melodies of callused hands for a dozen generations back, but he'd have generally never dared even mention it around a real musician like Ackerley. There'd been been a few bottles around the Room of Requirement, though, and somehow he'd wound up with the guitar. He'd picked his way through Oggyman and the half of Trelawney he could remember, but it had taken another four shots to take the instrument back and admit he'd sort of figured out the chords to Stan Rogers' Matter of Heart, something that had stuck with him since he'd first heard it sung at the Shanty Festival three years prior. He didn't say anything about it being for Steve. He didn't need to.

**12. He was one of the most ferocious hand to hand fighters in the DA.**  
There was a room underneath the Star and Chain that no one talked about and everyone knew, and it was where his father had been making almost all his drinking money since he was Derek's age as one of the most ferocious bare-knuckle fighters in the West Country. He'd been teaching Derek to fight since he was barely walking, and even though he was still a fair three inches and five stone shy of his father's nearly 6'8" and 320lbs or decades of brutal experience, the youth had a right hook that could shatter an oak plank like plaster and the ability to shake off blows that would have put some of his fellow DA members damn near in a coma. When one sparring session had put him against both Fritz and Rowan, Michael had described it in awed horror as "human bear baiting."

**13. He had only met Stephen's parents once.**  
He'd given his father the wrong time for the train in hopes of catching a few minutes with Dee and Tisistaawasiko Cornfoot, but he'd already written home about his marks, and his parents came early. He'd barely said hello when he heard his father's voice boom out from only a few feet behind him. The embarrassment at being asked what he was doing "o'er at the wrong carriage with they Redskins" was nothing compared to the relief that he'd been mere seconds away from using the phrase "your son's boyfriend" out loud. Beyond that, he didn't even dare keep so much as a picture of Stephen, or send a single letter, and it was only odd, coded mementos like a small maplewood eagle that saw him through the long holidays.

**14. He was number five on Lavender's list of Top Ten Heroic Dumbshit Moves that year.**  
It hadn't been particularly something he'd thought out, but out of the rest of that list, really only Michael Corner could say that his HAD been. It was after one of their better recruitment pranks, the one with the talking taps, and Derek had come around the corner to find Amycus taking out his frustration on a group of cowering, sobbing first year Slytherin girls. He's not entirely sure what happened next. Creevey just described it as "Epic Hulk Smash," but he knew that he made a SOUND and grabbed Amycus by the shoulder and within the next few seconds, the Death Eater had been bodily flung half the length of the hallway, Snape had opened a classroom door, and he had seen entire nebulae worth of stars. But he did remember the little girls had gotten away.

**15. He stayed behind for spring break of '98 to be with Stephen**  
It was the first time he had outright disobeyed his family, he knew what the letters he didn't dare open would say, he'd been told by Sprout that they'd ordered him home, but he was seventeen, and they couldn't make him. He knew it was a point of no return, but he didn't have a choice. The MBRC had retroactively revoked Steve's blood status because a 700 year old unbroken Shamanic lineage didn't count if it wasn't "properly" recorded, and after what had happened to the Creeveys, they'd all agreed he wasn't safe back in Ipswich...but nor, Derek swore, would he be alone at the castle.

**16. He loved riddles and logic puzzles**  
Steve had started him on them as a study aide, but they reminded him of the detective novels he'd enjoyed as a child and the imagined challenges that lay ahead in unraveling the complicated cases and impossible mysteries the Aurors surely dealt with. He insisted on always doing them in his head, and by the time he was fifteen he was inventing his own, keeping his mind busy while his body labored and then challenging his coworkers at each break. They were nothing special at first, but after only a few weeks, other quays had started sending their cleverest over to take on the Adams lad's puzzlers.

**17. He had a tattoo**  
An old-fashioned pirate ship on his left calf, he got it over the summer between fifth and sixth year. To call it an impulse move was an understatement. He'd just gone his own first set beneath the Star and Chain, it was past midnight, his pockets were full, his blood up, he'd had a few more than good judgement, and, well, the tattooist had been lazing around the empty shop with his shirt off being bloody lovely. The pirate ship was the first thing he'd spotted that looked cool, and when Callum-the-shirtless-tattooist had started flirting, there had never been a breakneck broomstick dive that had felt as dangerously thrilling as just smiling back _that_ way.

**18. His father nearly broke his heart with an act of Christmas kindness**  
Derek had first known something was very off when he met him at the train in a suit and tie. He only owned one, and he wore it like a bull in a bridal gown, but he'd plastered his hair with a kilo of pomade and brought Derek's Sunday best as well. They were going to Whitehall, wanted to make some introductions and ask a few questions. He'd been thinking on it for years, and as much as it went against all tradition, he knew Derek would be wasted on the docks. There was, he revealed, almost £15000 he'd managed to set away over the past five years, most of it winnings but a bit scraped from the household fund, and he wanted Derek to take it to get a start on his way to being a proper Detective Inspector when he finished wizard school. He never understood the half of why there were tears streaming down his son's face or why he was embraced quite that tightly by a boy trembling quite that hard.

**19. He was planning to run away**  
By that same Christmas break, the plans were already in place, the visa approved, his application accepted with the RCMP's Auror Academy pending the results of the NEWTs already scheduled for June due to having studied like a madman. He knew he couldn't stay closeted much longer, it was tearing him to pieces, but he also knew that at the moment he came out, Falmouth - and specifically, home, more specifically, his father - would not be safe for quite a while, if ever again. He would need to be gone and gone immediately and gone far, far away, and he was thankful beyond words that the Cornfoot family had agreed to sponsor him until he got on his own two feet, not even because he was Steve's boyfriend, but simply, they said, because he needed help.

**20. He knew he wouldn't live the night**  
When they'd made those plans, they'd been assuming almost one to one odds. They'd been assuming they'd have the element of surprise. They'd been assuming they'd have all their strategies, all their numbers. They'd been assuming so many things that weren't three hundred Death Eaters plus werewolves and giants making a coordinated frontal assault with Neville stripped of all but nominal command and two thirds of the DA evacuated. When they'd made those plans, he'd been a boy, big and brash and invincible. But he was a man when he grabbed Steven on the stairs as they separated to their posts and kissed him what he knew was goodbye, and when he stood at the front doors and listened to hell gathering beyond the gates, for the first time in his life, Derek Adams felt very, very small.


End file.
